AutoCAD® 2009 & AutoCAD LT® 2009 All-in-One Desk Reference for Dummies®

Chapter 4. Scaling Mt. Annotation

Annotation plays a large role in technical drawings, whether that annotation is in the form of single-line or multiline text, dimensions, or hatching. Up until AutoCAD 2008, it was difficult to control the display of annotation in a drawing. If you plotted from the Model tab, you scaled up your annotation objects so they plotted at the correct size, the same with plotting annotation in a viewport on a paper space layout. However, if you placed text on a layout, you created the text at its actual plotted size. This was fairly simple, but after you started using viewports on a layout that contained different scales for the objects on the Model tab, you ended up with text in one viewport larger than text in the other viewport, which made things look nonuniform. Many users worked around this problem by creating multiple annotation objects at different sizes and different layers, and then controlling which annotation layer was displayed in the different viewports. Autodesk's answer to this problem is annotation scaling, which you might at first find confusing mainly because of the way we had to deal with annotation since the dawn of AutoCAD.

In this chapter I take you through working with annotation objects and using annotation scaling. If you have existing drawings that you work with, you might have to continue calculating the height of annotation objects, but for your new drawings you should seriously consider using annotation scaling.

The What, With, ...